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Right. It's part of what makes the game so much fun. In chess if an expert played a noob he would probably crush him every game, but with poker the noob always has a chance.
The game teaches you a lot about your own psychology too, since if you are a winning player you will likely eventually hit a downswing that you thought was impossible before.

travdaddy writes "As reported on Slashdot only about a week ago, a passage of a gambling bill in Massachusetts would have criminalized online poker. That passage has been stricken due to the help of a grass-roots organization called the Poker Players Alliance. It 'quickly got the message to all of its Massachusetts members — around 25,000 people — and over 1,000,000 nationwide to make their voices heard; apparently lawmakers were listening since the language making online poker illegal — and online gaming in general — was taken out of the legislation.' Another Massachusetts bill may even 'take [poker] completely out of the gambling genre' and make it legislated as a game of skill."

Why would a site need shills to make money? They poker sites take rake out of pots to generate revenue. The more pots played, the more money they make. The ideal situation for them is for players to play as much as possible.

Please also consider this argument, which is completely parallel to your own:

Trailrunner7 writes "In their constant quest to find new and interesting ways to abuse the Internet, attackers recently have begun using an old technique to obfuscate URLs and IP addresses to bypass URL filters and direct users to malicious sites. The technique takes advantage of the fact that modern browsers will allow users to specify IP addresses in formats other than base 10. So a typical IP address that looks something like this — 192.10.10.1 — can also be written in base 8, hexadecimal or a handful of other formats, and the browser will recognize it and take the user to the specified site. What is interesting though is that due to the relative obscurity of using such methods to denote an IP or URL, it is quite feasible that existing security products do not correctly identify the URLs as valid or flag them as malicious when they point to existing known bad websites."